, etc., navigation, travellers, voyagers, etc., etc. If I go into
Scotland, shall I engage Walter Scott to write the history of Scottish
poets? Tell me, however, what you think of the plan. It would have one
prodigious advantage: whatever accident stopped the work, would only
prevent the future good, not mar the past; each volume would be a great
and valuable work "per se". Then each volume would awaken a new
interest, a new set of readers, who would buy the past volumes of
course; then it would allow you ample time and opportunities for the
slavery of the catalogue volumes, which should be at the same time an
index to the work, which would be, in very truth, a pandect of
knowledge, alive and swarming with human life, feeling, incident. By the
bye, what a strange abuse has been made of the word encyclopaedia! It
signifies, properly, grammar, logic, rhetoric, and ethics and
metaphysics, which last, explaining the ultimate principles of
grammar--log., rhet., and eth.--formed a circle of knowledge. * * * To
call a huge unconnected miscellany of the "omne scibile", in an
arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters, an
encyclopaedia, is the impudent ignorance of your Presbyterian bookmakers.
Good night!
God bless you! S. T. C.
[Footnote 1: Southey's biographer says regarding this scheme: "Soon
after the date of the letter, my father paid a short visit to London,
the chief purpose of which was to negotiate with Messrs.
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